


Kintsugi

by moon1ightknight



Category: Lost in Translation (Webcomic)
Genre: Angst, Character Reflection, Hurt/No Comfort, Kintsugi, Probably ooc, Projecting, Too Many Metaphors, ventfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-13 21:07:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28909809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moon1ightknight/pseuds/moon1ightknight
Summary: Sometimes, though, things shatter beyond repair. With one wrong, careless move, what was once beautiful can instantly be broken into thousands of tiny, sharp fragments, scattered before you and too broken to ever fully collect and piece back together.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	Kintsugi

**Author's Note:**

> This is a vent fic, so it's probably pretty ooc, sorry. Don't read too much into it, or do, I honestly don't know

Kintsugi (also referred to as kintsukuroi) is a traditional Japanese method of repairing broken pottery or dishes with a lacquer mixed with powdered gold (or other precious metals such as silver and platinum). The philosophy behind the practice is that with the history of the breakage visible, the new product is more beautiful and has more meaning to it than if the breakage was covered up and not acknowledged. 

In some ways, a human’s heart is like pottery. The creation and the life is beautiful, but if handled carelessly, it too can shatter. 

Sometimes, it can be mended, though. With love as gold and shining as the lacquer in kintsugi, a heart can be made whole- and, sometimes, even more beautiful. 

Sometimes, though, things shatter beyond repair. With one wrong, careless move, what was once beautiful can instantly be broken into thousands of tiny, sharp fragments, scattered before you and too broken to ever fully collect and piece back together. 

This, too, is true for both ceramic and humans. 

(Most often, such an agony for humans is caused by the sharpest loneliness.)

Unfortunately, this was a pain from which no one in Mayhem was exempt. 

***

Minsoo tried his best to ignore the pang of loneliness that he felt every time he opened Twitter. He tried to scroll past all the trending hashtags of Sa1nt, detailing every new thing they’ve done down to their every little breath, which the fans freaked out over constantly. He tried to keep his eyes locked tightly on his feed and whatever memes or gaming content was there. 

He didn’t let himself stray to the trending page. 

He didn’t let himself stray to his painfully empty mentions page, either. 

It had been like this for years- years, while he was still a trainee under HCE, watching his brother’s fame grow each and every day. Years, even after he debuted, and he still wasn’t a fraction of what Minsung was.

Sometimes, he wondered what he was doing wrong. It’s not that he wasn’t thankful for every Mayniac that they did have- it was just that, even still, he couldn’t help but feel like he was failing as a leader. He could see it in the way the rest of Mayhem looked at every not-quite-full venue, at their lack of invitations to award shows and events, at the numbers of other idol groups. 

Maybe he was projecting, maybe they weren’t actually upset- but it drove the bitterness in Minsoo home nonetheless. 

Whenever this happened, he would pull back from the others. He’d work harder, train harder, push everyone-  _ especially himself _ \- harder. Because surely that was the issue with him as leader: he wasn’t trying enough. 

So, he took all his leisure time and put it towards working for Mayhem. 

What he didn’t realize is that all this time drew from the time he should have been bonding with his members instead. 

Sometimes, Minsoo found himself staring at the newest Sa1nt headline. No matter how hard he tried to avoid them, they always managed to still appear on his phone anyways, and he always ended up reading them. 

Perhaps that was the most painful part of all- the fact that even after everything, his first instinct was still being a brother. His first instinct was still to be happy, to want to congratulate him in his success. 

That’s why it hurts so much more whenever he remembered the price that had been paid for that success. 

Eventually, Minsoo muted the word ‘Sa1nt’ and all of the members’ names on Twitter. Then, he deleted Minsung’s contact from his phone. 

It was lonelier this way, but it was also better this way.

***

Daehyun always bonded with people easily. It was like a second nature to him- if you’re friendly enough and you smile enough, it was hard to not be liked by most people you meet. Generally, whenever he walked away from a social situation, he left with the feeling of having formed a potential new friendship. 

The issue, though, is that that’s what it always was: a  _ potential  _ friendship. 

It very rarely formed into something else, though. He didn’t like to admit it, but he’s been too scared to nurse those potential friendships since middle school. 

Maybe he could blame it on the fact that he was so busy. He was an idol- he had promotions and events to attend, and between that he spent most of his time busking. There was little room between that to nurse a budding friendship into something more. It was easier to pretend that this was all it was. 

He knew, though, that if that was all it was then he would be closer to Mayhem. He was never too busy to hang out with them- after all, most of the time when he was busy, he was busy  _ with  _ them. 

It wasn’t that he wasn’t friends with Mayhem. He loved them all dearly, and he almost thought of them as family. He loved Minsoo’s chaos that complimented his own so perfectly. He loved Dongho’s strange, cold way of showing affection that always made him feel safe and secure. And Jaewon- well, he was still trying to understand Jaewon, but he was still like another brother to him. 

Even still, though, there was a chasm between them that he could feel deep in his heart. A chasm that he could look across and ignore if he believed well enough, but that would still exist no matter if he acknowledged it or not. He still didn’t know much about Mayhem, not in the way that one should with their closest friends: he didn’t know for the longest of time what had occurred between Minsoo and his brother. He didn’t know why Dongho seemed to be someone completely void of a past other than a vague ‘my family lives in California’ and then complete silence. And Jaewon- well, what was there that he could say he  _ did  _ know about Jaewon? 

He could blame his loneliness on his status as an idol, on his schedule and dedication, but he knew that wasn’t the truth. 

The truth was, he was scared. 

He was so scared to let down anyone who he got too close to. He had been close to people, once... And he had failed them. Seemingly in the blink of an eye, he was completely alone with the fragments of the relationships he had with his two best friends in middle school. 

He was lonely because he was scared of failing anyone else around him. He was lonely because he figured that the only way to avoid doing this was by subtly removing himself from the equation entirely and distancing his emotions from anyone he met since middle school.

(He tried to ignore the guilty knowledge that he was still failing people around him, knowledge that nagged the back of his mind whenever he looked at Jaewon.)

***

At this point, loneliness was almost like a friend to Jaewon in the most ironic of ways. He’d never been without it, never knew what it was like to not have your closest companion be the stark and painful  _ lack  _ of companions. 

It’s unclear if that made everything hurt so much more or significantly less. 

At this point, it was impossible to gauge how he felt in general: in the face of pain, all he could feel was numb. 

Throughout middle and high school, in the face of bullying and loneliness, he had quickly learned how to turn off his mind and stop feeling. He had learned how to sit through the verbal abuse like a zombie, hardly understanding the world around him because it was easier this way. 

( _Dissociation,_ he heard it called once. Honestly, he didn’t care what it was called. All that mattered was that it _worked_.) 

It wasn’t necessarily intentional, but Jaewon had adapted the practice into a daily part of his life, even as an adult. 

After he was forced to take the fall for his first scandal? Numbness. 

After Mayhem’s friendly gazes turned to ice and stone? Numbness. 

After he lost their friendship completely, after he stopped spending time with them, after the headlines became an almost weekly occurrence?  _ Numbness.  _

After all of this and more in a particularly painful day? Well, at night is when all his walls crumbled, when he was void of the energy required to suppress his own emotions. 

At night is when he let himself cry, always careful not to wake up Daehyun, who slept just below him. Daehyun, who was always none the wiser to Jaewon’s breakdowns every night. (Was he relieved about that? Did it make everything hurt more? Could it be both?)

At night is when he felt the full weight of his loneliness, let himself acknowledge the truth. 

And the truth was? He  _ missed _ the semblances of relationships he had once had. He missed how close he used to be to his mother, before fear of slipping up and revealing his secret clouded their every interaction, before that fear forced himself to become distant to the one constant that he’d ever had. He missed Mayhem before they had debuted, when they were four starry-eyed young adults looking ahead to what they thought to be a future of fame and happiness. 

He missed being anything other than the embodiment of a horribly tangled web of lies. 

Of course, this was a pain he never wanted anyone else around him to feel. That’s why, every morning, he would get up and continue on with life as if the previous night had never happened- because, to everyone else, it  _ hadn’t.  _ He’d return to his numb state, the smile on his face being yet another string in the web of lies. 

***

Maybe Dongho didn’t have a right to complain about loneliness. 

Maybe, every event that lead to him being in this position had been entirely his own decision. 

He had decided to run from his family and live an entire country away. He hadn’t decided on the pain that staying caused him- he hadn’t decided on the way his family treated him, or on when he would finally snap and be unable to continue functioning like this. But he  _ had  _ decided to flee from everyone he knew in America. 

He decided, from that moment, to be less open and honest about his feelings. He wouldn’t wear his heart on his sleeve to get stomped on from there on out. 

He decided to become Kang Dongho: Cold and reserved to the world beyond him. 

If he decided to become Kang Dongho, then could he really complain about the loneliness that came with it? 

Could he complain that when it came to an emotional level, he seemed to be the most distant from Mayhem? The others all had each other- it was evident to him since that one day he had woken up to his phone exploding with notifications, seeing that Minsoo had dragged Dae to a family gathering to avoid his brother. When faced with an emotional conflict like that, Dongho was never the one they went to. He was never even considered.

(He didn’t want to admit that seeing Dae meet Minsoo’s family hurt in several ways he hadn’t considered it would.)

When Jaewon had come to him about the sasaeng issue, it had been a beacon of hope that he clung to for a while after that. Sure, he knew that it was out of practicality that Jaewon came to him more than anything- but he was still glad he could at least be there for someone, be  _ something  _ to someone. Something that denoted safety instead of cool detachment. 

And even still, it hurt. 

And even still, once things were done and resolved, he went back to how he was. He went back to watching Mayhem from the outside, being a friend when it came to humor and practicality, but never being seen as a friend when it came to emotional bonding. 

(He wondered if the other members of Mayhem even realized that it was like this. Maybe Dongho had spent too much time reading into it, maybe he was more aware than he should have been.)

Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. He never got closer to Mayhem because he was always scared of showing his true emotions. He was always scared of showing his true emotions because he never got closer to Mayhem. Maybe all he had to blame was himself. 

He would always blame himself. 

***

Mayhem wasn’t whole together, not exactly. Each one of them had splintered into their own thousands of shards, had swept them under the rug to hide the pieces and the pain from each other. 

Together they weren’t whole, but they could at least pretend to be, because what else was there left for them?

(Perhaps their relationship couldn’t be compared to Kintsugi, not in all of its beauty and completeness. Maybe, though, it wouldn’t be too far off to compare it to something adjacent. Super glue mixed with gold paint, perhaps. Clinging to each other, pretending to be okay, pretending to be bright and beautiful, but all just a painful facade.) 


End file.
